Laser cooling of calcium in a 'golden ratio' quasi-electrostatic lattice

A 3D lattice based on a high-power CO2 laser is considered in the context of laser cooling and trapping of atomic calcium. We expect to be able to realize a system with >10 000 lattice sites each with more than 100 atoms, and the facility to laser cool all the atoms into the vibrational ground state using the intercombination line. The configuration allows the production of an array of small Bose-Einstein condensates, enabling an investigation of the build-up of phase coherence as a function of atom number